


The Hypothetico-Deductive Method

by Philosopher_King



Series: The Three-Body Problem [10]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: But he's working on it, Detective Kya, Discussion of Homophobia, F/M, Hints of Kya/Lin, I guess I'll just roll with it, I never thought I would use that tag, Kid Fic, Kya takes after Uncle Sokka, M/M, Minor Mai/Ty Lee (Avatar), Minor Mai/Zuko, Multi, References to Canon Child Abuse, The Adventures of Kya the Spy, The Kids Figure It Out, Zuko is bad with people, Zuko's Scar (Avatar), and also Lin/Tenzin, how did Kya/Izumi get in there?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: Uncle Zuko is visiting Air Temple Island, and 15-year-old Kya begins to suspect that Something is Going On between him and her parents, Aang and Katara. Tenzin is skeptical; Bumi is amused; and Kya decides to investigate and gather conclusive evidence that her suspicions are correct. Awkwardness, uncomfortable conversations, and amateur spy shenanigans ensue.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Aang/Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Aang/Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Three-Body Problem [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515
Comments: 64
Kudos: 330





	1. Day 1: Analysis

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in the same universe as the previous fics in my Zutaraang series, but you don't have to read those to understand this. I'm also planning to fill in the gaps in the timeline later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was just supposed to be a short conversation with the kids speculating. Then I got really attached to my version of Kya and wanted her to get some answers. And then it got so long that I decided to post it in 2 parts; the second chapter is already almost as long as the first, but the action has not yet resolved.

“Do you think something is going on between Mom and Dad and Uncle Zuko?” Kya asked, apparently out of the blue.

It was an absurdly beautiful spring day on Air Temple Island, which was why Bumi, Kya, and Tenzin were all enjoying the sunshine on one of its many tree-lined, sheltered beaches. At least, that was why their father told them they should go outside. Their mother, more frank and straightforward, had shooed them out of the house because the Fire Lord was visiting Republic City and they wanted to catch up with their old friend in peace.

Tenzin, all of thirteen and already more serious than their father the Avatar, glanced up from the book of Air Nomad lore he was reading (but if he thought she didn’t know about the epics and dramas that Uncle Zuko brought from the Fire Nation and Tenzin sometimes hid inside his history tomes and philosophy scrolls, he needed to think again). “You mean you think they’re planning something?”

Kya, fifteen years old and already a woman of the world, let the water she had been bending into funny animal shapes splash back into the inlet and scoffed at his naïveté. “No, I mean I think there’s something _going on_. _Between_ them.”

Up until now, Bumi hadn’t paused in his steady routine of throwing his knife at a tree, going to pull it out, going back to stand at a distance, and throwing it again. ( _Whoosh, thunk, skitter skitter_ , softer _thunk, skitter skitter, whoosh._ It was becoming quite irritating.) But Kya’s last statement caught his attention enough that when he let go of the knife, it went flying into the bushes with a crash instead of _thunk_ ing into the tree. After a moment of stunned silence, he started laughing uproariously.

Tenzin chose to ignore him, which was becoming his default approach to Bumi. “That’s ridiculous,” he said to Kya, already turning red with indignation or embarrassment or both. “With _both_ of them?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“But… but Dad is married to Mom, and Uncle Zuko is married to Aunt Mai.”

Kya gave him her best contemptuous look, like he was the most unintelligent creature ever to crawl out of the primordial muck (which, to be fair, was how she looked at him most of the time… but even more so now). “So?” Hadn’t he ever heard of affairs?

“So… Dad and Uncle Zuko both like women.”

“People can like both,” Kya said authoritatively. “Avatar Kyoshi did.”

Bumi still hadn’t stopped laughing. Kya was starting to worry that he would run out of air and Tenzin would have to resuscitate him… which he would, if reluctantly.

“Okay, suppose that’s true. What’s your proof about the three of them?”

“Well, Mom and Dad are always going to visit Uncle Zuko in the Fire Nation. Sometimes just one of them, sometimes both. But they almost never take us with them.”

“Of course not, because we have to go to school!”

“Even in the summer, though, they go without us.”

“They do take us on vacation to Ember Island…”

“What, every couple of years? And they still send us off to amuse ourselves while they ‘catch up with’ Uncle Zuko at the beach house.”

“Sometimes grown-ups like to talk without kids around,” Tenzin said knowingly, as if he spoke from personal experience.

“Maybe. But haven’t you noticed how much they all _touch_ each other when they’re together? All of them, not just Mom and Dad.”

“And spirits know they’re oogie enough on their own,” Bumi put in, having finally stopped laughing.

Tenzin thought about it and squirmed a little, probably unconsciously. “They have been friends for a long time,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but they’re not that physically affectionate with Auntie Toph.” She hated being called that, but Aang and Katara insisted on the respectful title, at least when referring to her in her absence.

“I’d like to see _anyone_ try to be physically affectionate with Auntie Toph,” Bumi commented.

“They do show physical affection with Uncle Sokka,” Tenzin pointed out.

“I very much hope there’s nothing _going on_ there…” said Bumi.

“Gross, Bumi,” Kya said with a curl of her lip.

Tenzin gave Bumi a contemptuous look that, with some work, could almost rival Kya’s, but otherwise didn’t lower himself to respond.

“And yeah, they do touch Uncle Sokka a lot, but it’s different,” Kya continued. “There’s a lot of elbowing and light shoving and acting like… you know, like _siblings_. Not putting hands on each other’s hands and shoulders and sitting really close and leaning into each other. When they touch Uncle Sokka, it’s playful; with Zuko it’s more… _tender_.”

Bumi and Tenzin both shuddered: a rare show of unity.

“Please never use that word again,” Bumi implored. “It just makes me think of… slow-cooked meat.”

“Or injuries,” Tenzin added. “Bruises. Swollen flesh.”

Kya snorted and Bumi guffawed. “Tenzin, I hope I never hear you use _those_ words again,” said Kya.

When Tenzin figured out what they were laughing about, he turned very, _very_ red.

“I still think this is all very circumstantial,” he protested after they all got themselves more or less under control.

“What, you want me to have eyewitness evidence?”

“Oh, sun, moon, and sky bison,” said Bumi, shuddering again. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Even Tenzin.”

“Fuck you, Bumi,” said Tenzin, still red and getting redder.

Kya gasped, while Bumi started laughing again. “Where did you hear _that_ word, young man?” Kya demanded with mock outrage. “Mom would clean your mouth out with saltwater.”

“Oh, we all know it was Toph,” said Bumi. “Mom and Dad can never make her keep it clean around us. Or her own kids, for that matter.”

“Uncle Zuko says it too, when he thinks we can’t hear him,” Tenzin said defensively. “So does Mom.”

“Dad still just says _monkeyfeathers_ ,” Bumi scoffed. “Unbelievable.”

There was a lull in the conversation and Kya went back to bending animal shapes out of the creek water. She made a dragon to look like Druk, whom she desperately wanted to be able to ride, but who was just as uncomfortable and prickly around everyone as his master—everyone except Aang and Katara, that is.

“Oh shit,” said Kya abruptly, letting the shape collapse and fall back into the stream (Tenzin muttered something about washing out _her_ mouth). “What if Zuko is my dad?”

Bumi paused before he ended up throwing the knife into the bushes again. “ _Your_ dad specifically?”

Kya gave him another one of her patented _you’re an idiot_ looks. “Well, he obviously couldn’t be Tenzin’s dad. And I just can’t imagine him being related to _you_.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Bumi acknowledged.

“Really, Kya?” Tenzin asked in his best disapproving-and-more-mature-than-you voice. “You think you’re the Fire Lord’s secret illegitimate daughter? Are you sure you haven’t been reading too many of those Fire Nation drama scrolls?”

“Oh, piss off. We all know you read more of them than I do.”

“I do not!”

“What’s inside that book, Tenzin?”

“Nothing!” he protested, turning it upside down to shake out the pages. But his face turned red enough that Kya knew it was just a matter of luck that he was innocent today. “And I still think you’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

Kya huffed in frustration. “You know what? I’m going to prove it. I’m going to get conclusive proof that something is going on.”

“How? By spying on them?” Tenzin asked disdainfully.

“Yes! I’m going to watch them after they send us to bed and I’m going to prove that something is _up_.”

All three of them acted perfectly innocent at dinner and through the long conversation that followed, over tea for Aang, Kya, and Tenzin and brandy for Zuko and Katara—and, after some wheedling and a reluctant surrender, for Bumi (“but only half a glass!” Katara insisted sternly).

Zuko asked about their studies; Bumi and Kya answered perfunctorily, and Bumi professed his interest in joining the United Forces after he turned eighteen in two months. Aang and Katara pointedly said nothing; it was a point of contention within the family. Zuko politely raised his eyebrows (no, _eyebrow_ , singular; it was easy to forget if you weren’t really looking) and said, “Ah. Well, the United Republic will be lucky to have you.” Aang gave him a look of utter betrayal, to which Zuko responded with a puzzled frown. Clearly they were going to have a _talk_ later ( _before or after other… activities?,_ Kya wondered).

Of course, when Zuko asked Tenzin about his studies, the teachers’ pet engaged him and Aang in a long discussion of the history and philosophy behind Air Nomad customs around the separation of the sexes. Kya watched the adults like a hawk when the topic of same-sex relationships inevitably came up (and something tightened in her chest thinking about the way her stomach flipped whenever she saw Lin Beifong, and how much it hurt to watch her moon after _Tenzin_ , that prematurely middle-aged stick in the mud).

“The Air Nomads were always the most open-minded,” said Zuko, who of course knew as much as Aang did about Air Nomad culture because of all his years spent hunting the Avatar (and probably knew more about their history and literature). “There was a period of Fire Nation history when it was customary for young noblemen to be mentored in statecraft and the fighting arts by an older male lover… but it came to be seen as exploitative and fell into disfavor even before Sozin’s day.”

“What about relationships between two men of the same age?” Kya asked suddenly, breaking a long silence. “Or two women?”

Zuko looked surprised at who had spoken, but he answered her question as graciously as he had Tenzin’s. “Azulon outlawed relations between men—punishable by imprisonment for the lower classes and banishment for the nobility. Between women… no one ever cared as much, either in the days when the lover-mentor relationship was sacred or when it was forbidden. That said… after Azulon made the law about men, it became much harder to find the old romantic dramas and erotic poetry about love between women.”

“And it became treasonous to mention the very popular rumor that Fire Lord Sozin and Avatar Roku were more than just _great friends_ in their youth,” Aang contributed, looking over at Zuko with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. The look Zuko returned to him seemed to be a warning glare—at least Kya thought it was a glare; his scar did make it look like he was always glaring—and did he just shake his head slightly?

Kya shot a very significant _I told you something was up_ look at Tenzin—who gave an uncertain frown in return—before she turned back toward Zuko. “But you changed that, right?”

“Yes… quietly. With all the other changes I’d been forcing on my people, I didn’t want it to become another matter of controversy. Or a way for traditionalists to claim that I’m undermining the moral character of the nation as well as its defense and economy…”

Kya wasn’t entirely satisfied, but she didn’t really want to get into an argument with the Fire Lord about taking a public stand for what was right… especially one who had survived so many insults, minor uprisings, and assassination attempts for doing just that. “What about in the Water Tribe?” she asked her mother.

“Oh! In the Southern Water Tribe, it’s always been… an accepted fact of life, but not one that anyone talks about much. As long as you marry and have children, everyone looks the other way if you also have a lover of the same sex. It’s not nearly as big a scandal as adultery where there’s a possibility of… er… uncertain paternity.”

 _Funny she should mention that…_ thought Kya. “But it’s different in the North?”

“Gender roles are far more rigid there. But it is possible for someone who’s born female to live as a man, becoming a warrior and taking a wife—or for someone born male to live as a woman, becoming a healer if she’s a bender, and a wife to a man who will have her.”

“So… Grandpa Pakku would have been willing to teach you combat bending if you had worn trousers and a wolf-tail and given a man’s name?”

“Yes. But I didn’t know that at the time… and even if I had, I wouldn’t have been willing to lie about who I was to learn what I had a right to know.”

“I didn’t think you were this interested in comparative anthropology, Kya,” her father (or was he?) remarked with gentle amusement.

Tenzin coughed politely; Bumi smirked. Kya glared at both of them. “I’m not _un_ interested.”

“Curiosity should be encouraged, at whatever age it emerges,” Zuko said mildly. He probably intended the remark to be neutral and inoffensive, but Kya’s cheeks burned at the condescension, and the implicit comparison with Tenzin (and probably Izumi, too; she was just as serious and studious. Why didn’t Tenzin go after _her_ instead of Lin, who had an actual personality?).

Katara looked over at Kya with a sympathetic wince; she was no doubt long accustomed to Zuko’s lack of tact. “Shouldn’t you kids be in bed by now?” she asked abruptly.

Tenzin immediately stood up to take his cup and the teapot to the kitchen—and collected Aang’s and Kya’s cups while he was at it. _Complete kiss-up,_ Kya thought contemptuously.

Kya made a token protest so that her parents wouldn’t suspect how eagerly she had been waiting for them to dismiss their children: “Why do _we_ have to go to bed when you’re probably going to stay up for another two hours?”

“Because growing teenagers need their sleep, that’s why,” said Katara.

“And we might go to bed soon, too,” said Aang with a yawn.

Tenzin came back in and dutifully hugged both of his parents good night. When he said good night to Uncle Zuko, the latter returned the wish with a companionable shoulder-squeeze.

“Good night, all,” said Bumi. “Two more months and you won’t be telling me when to go to bed…”

“Ah, but your sergeant will,” Zuko said dryly.

Bumi laughed. “Still better than my mother.”

“See how you feel about that after a week in the army,” Katara said icily.

Kya was the last to say good night, submitting herself to her parents’ hugs with feigned teenage reluctance.

“You know, you could go to university, here or in Ba Sing Se or even the Caldera, and research all the nations’ customs about same-sex relationships,” said Zuko, by way of encouragement. “You could become a scholar, and publish books with what you discover.”

“Is that just your disappointment I’m hearing—that you had to become Fire Lord instead of the world’s foremost expert in Avatar Studies?” Aang ribbed him with a sly smile.

Zuko chuckled, which was a rare enough sound that Kya startled. It sounded even more hoarse and rusty than his voice usually did, as if he was out of practice. She found herself forgiving him for his unwitting condescension, and maybe thinking she wouldn’t mind if he _was_ her… _No, Tenzin was right (for once); I have been reading too many Fire Nation dramas._

That didn’t mean she was abandoning her plan to gather substantiation for her suspicions, however.

She got ready for bed, making sure she neither rushed nor dawdled; she wanted to take about the same amount of time that she usually did. But after brushing her teeth and washing her face, she didn’t change into her nightgown; she just turned off the light, put her shoes back on, and climbed out through her window. (It was something she did often enough when sneaking out to meet her friends from school to go drink or smoke on the beach.)

She hid among the trees at a distance from the house where she could see the windows both of her parents’ room and of the living room where they had been talking. She had still heard the sounds of conversation and occasional laughter (even that strange rusty sound from Zuko) while she had been washing up, and sure enough, the lights were still on in the living room, but were not yet lit in her parents’ bedroom. So they were still just talking, for now.

She felt her eyelids drooping while she watched the windows for any change, so she kept herself awake by bending droplets of nighttime dew from the leaves and grass around her, swirling it around her fingers, making it into a bracelet, then three rings, then a thin glove…

Finally the lights dimmed and extinguished in the living room. She held her breath, watching two windows alternately: her parents’ bedroom, and the guest room in the men’s dormitory where Zuko was (supposedly) staying. The light came on in her parents’ room first; of course it would, it was closer. So she would watch Zuko’s room, and if the lights _didn’t_ come on there, she would get closer to her parents’ window to try to see, or hear, how many people were in there. And possibly (though the thought made her insides squirm) what they were doing. Though of course if she got _any_ sort of visual confirmation she would stop watching immediately! She didn’t need a whole album of those images burned into her brain.

Not long after, she saw a light in the men’s dormitory. Disappointment deflated her ribcage like a balloon; she felt a strange hollowness in her stomach. _Why are you_ disappointed _?_ she scolded herself. _You should be relieved that your parents aren’t having a weird three-way affair with their friend who you’ve called ‘Uncle’ since childhood. Definitely reading too many drama scrolls…_

But this wasn’t conclusive, she realized; one of her parents might have retired to their room, while the other went with Zuko to his. She would be even more horrified if only one of them was having an affair with him; the idea of them sharing this strange transgression was far more palatable than the idea of one of them betraying the other. Still, maybe they only… transgressed one at a time, albeit with the other’s knowledge.

So she crept along the line of trees toward the men’s dormitory, very carefully trying not to rustle too many leaves or break any branches. But how could she get close enough to the window to see or hear anything without being seen herself? She’d have to crawl along the ground below the eyeline from the window…

 _Oh fuck._ The White Lotus guards. They would certainly notice something like that, and assume someone was trying to assassinate the Fire Lord.

While she dithered in the trees, the lights went off in both her parents’ bedroom and Zuko’s guest room.

She had one last, desperate, not very good idea: climb back in through her window, creep _very, very quietly_ down the hall to her parents’ room, wait until sounds of moving around stopped or snoring started, then open the door _very, very quietly_ and see how many people were in the bed. If it was only one, she could infer where the other had gone.

So that’s what she did, because she felt too committed to give up now. Had the floorboards always been this creaky? Fortunately, no one opened a door to investigate the telltale creaks; maybe they sounded louder to her because of her nerves. She sat down next to her parents’ door to listen and wait.

If she’d thought it would be easy to tell what she was hearing, she was very wrong. That slight rustling noise—was that hoarse breathing? Someone shifting or turning over—in sleep, or while trying to reach it? Curtains blowing in the breeze? She had no idea how to tell whether it was safe to open the door and look.

She waited anyway, hoping that the unmistakable sound of snoring would be her cue… but even if it meant one person was asleep, what if there was someone else in the room who wasn’t? (Well, if her fa— if Aang was snoring, Katara would surely elbow him awake to tell him to turn onto his side.)

After some minutes—Kya had no idea how many—her eyes started drooping closed again, and she still hadn’t heard anything that assured her the person (or people) inside was (were) asleep. She had to face the fact that tonight had been a bust (as her more fashionable school friends might say). But she resolved to try again tomorrow night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm continuing the vaguely planetary/astronomical theme with the titles, because I enjoy my jokes a little too much. I went a little meta with this one, though: it's a Newton reference rather than an astronomy reference as such.


	2. Day 2: Synthesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More awkward conversations are had; Zuko asks Kya to demonstrate her waterbending and gives Bumi a very shouty lesson in dual swordsmanship; and Detective Kya makes a discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I say I was splitting it into 2 chapters? Now the second chapter has also undergone mitosis. Which works better with the very classical unfolding of the action over 3 days...

Kya woke several hours later than she normally did on a weekend morning; by the time she made it out to the kitchen, Bumi was just finishing breakfast, Katara was still reading the newspaper while nursing her third cup of coffee (Aang never drank anything stronger than tea, but like many waterbenders, Katara needed some assistance with morning), and everyone else had already left.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she asked her mother, perhaps a little accusing.

Katara looked up. “You looked like you needed the rest. Are you feeling all right? You look a little… haggard.”

“I’m fine,” Kya tried (and failed) not to snap as she sat down.

Katara gave her a skeptical look and reached across the table to feel her forehead. “You don’t seem to have a fever…”

Kya sighed impatiently and started putting food on her plate. At least the boys (and men) hadn’t entirely picked it over; there were still some of her favorite red bean buns and some slices of melon as well as the usual rice porridge. Katara laughed softly through her nose.

“What?”

“Just… that was a very fifteen-year-old sigh.”

Kya tightened her lips and tried not to glare or roll her eyes, which would only prove her mother’s point. _I’m not a child,_ she wanted to say. _And I’m not stupid. I can figure things out. And I deserve to know if my parents have been lovers with their best friend for my whole life._

She didn’t say any of that. She ate in silence, and Katara went back to her coffee and her newspaper.

As Kya was getting up to take her dishes to the sink, she saw through the window that Druk and Appa were returning from a morning flight over the city. She wondered whether Katara would have wanted to go with them, but had instead waited to make sure her laze-abed daughter wasn’t actually unwell.

Kya didn’t want to see Aang and Zuko, and she didn’t want to have to tell Bumi and Tenzin that she hadn’t found her proof last night, but she hadn’t given up yet. She just wanted to be alone to think… or better, not think. So she grabbed the silly, salacious novel she had been reading on a friend’s recommendation— _not_ one of the Fire Nation dramas of forbidden love and mistaken identity; just the latest crowd-pleasing crap someone in Republic City had churned out to make a few yuan—and went to her favorite spot in the woods on the island, where a little pool full of tiny darting fish and tadpoles gathered between two small waterfalls as the stream made its way down the island’s slopes into the bay.

Kya tried her best to shut her brain off and read, but she was finding it hard to focus on the absurd plot of the novel when the plot of her own life, it seemed, had become so absurd. _What if Zuko really is my dad? What if it’s not an arrangement with both of them—what if one of my parents is actually cheating on the other? What if Tenzin’s right and I am just imagining things? What does it say about_ me _if the idea that my parents are sleeping with their best friend is just an invention of my fevered brain? That I even tried to spy on them to prove it—and I fully intend to try it again?_

She gave up on reading and instead just played with the cold, clear water in the pool, making it into increasingly fantastical shapes—elephant-giraffes, unicorn-whales, ornate palaces, towering temples. It was soothing and distracting, at least.

Tenzin came to find her a little past noon. “Kya—”

“No, I didn’t find anything out last night,” she snapped. “But I’m trying again tonight, so don’t start crowing yet.”

Tenzin blinked. “I wasn’t— Mom just told me to find you and tell you to come in for lunch.”

“Oh.” Feeling foolish, Kya picked up her book, stood up, and brushed the dark forest earth off her dress.

Lunch was as uncomfortable as dinner last night had been. She cringed internally every time Katara casually put a hand on Zuko’s arm or Aang leaned a little too far into his personal space and he seemed _completely fine with it_ —even though she had seen how he flinched away when some overly ingratiating Republic City official or member of the Fire Nation or Earth Kingdom nobility stood too close, or made a gesture that threatened to turn into a touch.

Apparently Zuko had been watching Aang drill Tenzin on some airbending technique; they were talking about that, about how advanced he was and maybe soon he’d even be ready for his tattoos and no, he wouldn’t be getting them as young as Aang, but he wasn’t the Avatar so he shouldn’t feel bad about it… so Kya felt free to stop listening to their conversation, until she heard someone say her name.

“What?” she said, looking up in alarm.

“I said, your mother tells me you are becoming quite an accomplished waterbender,” Zuko repeated, unable to conceal the slight irritation in his voice.

“Oh! Uh. I guess?”

“Would you mind demonstrating something you’ve learned?”

Kya shrugged, then lifted the tea from her cup and bent it into the same little model of Druk that she’d shaped yesterday… just before having the thought that had upended her whole life.

Zuko smiled—a real smile, the kind that crinkled the corner of the eye that could still move—and gave another one of those hoarse chuckles. Then he flicked a finger and sent out a little tongue of flame that appeared to emerge from the mouth of Kya’s tea dragon.

Kya startled, but not so much that she lost control and splashed everyone with hot tea; she let the dragon collapse and the tea drop back into her cup with only some minor sloshing over the side.

“Magnificent,” said Zuko, and the smile was still in his voice. “That’s a much better use of waterbending than all the capsizing of ships and throwing of ice daggers that your mother was doing at your age.”

“Or the healing of mortal wounds?” Katara asked dryly. Kya knew that her mother had brought both Aang and Zuko back from the brink of death after being struck by the Mad Princess Azula’s lightning. (Zuko didn’t like it when he heard people call her that—the Mad Princess—but the epithet had stuck and there was little he could do about it now.)

“You shouldn’t have had to,” said Zuko. “Teenage waterbenders should be dunking their siblings in the ocean and etching rude words in the snow.”

“Oh, I did my fair share of that, trust me.”

“And what should teenage firebenders be doing, instead of burning down villages in pursuit of the Avatar and challenging their siblings to an Agni Kai for the throne?” Aang asked, amusement pulling at his lips.

“Crisping their siblings’ food and etching rude words into wooden walls,” Zuko said with his own amused mouth-quirk. “Maybe suddenly drawing all the heat out of their uncle’s bathwater.”

“That last one I trust you did,” Aang said, now fully grinning.

“Guilty as charged,” said Zuko… and was he _grinning back?_ In all the years she’d known him, Kya wasn’t sure she’d ever seen that… but then, the adults had seldom had real conversations around Kya and her siblings when they were younger.

“Izumi doesn’t have any siblings whose food she can crisp,” Kya pointed out on some perverse impulse. _What, are you hoping Zuko will slip up and admit Izumi does have a half-sister after all?_ she scolded herself.

Zuko’s grin faded into a polite half-smile. “No, unfortunately. Mai endured childbirth once and then told me she didn’t love me enough to do it again… so I had better be very careful with this heir, because I wasn’t getting a spare.”

“You must love Dad a lot,” Kya said to her mother. Tenzin was staring very intensely at her from the end of the table, and when he caught her eye, he gave a slight head-shake with a look of near panic. Bumi, next to her, was uncharacteristically quiet, rubbing his forehead as if he had a headache.

Katara exchanged a look with Aang that seemed to communicate more than Kya could interpret, though she thought she detected a mix of mild confusion, amusement, and concern. “It does help to be a waterbender with healing abilities who can moderate your own pain. Surrounded by other waterbending healers who can step in to help.”

“You weren’t there when Izumi was born?”

Now Katara exchanged an odd fleeting look with Zuko. “No… she came early and I couldn’t make it in time.”

Bumi cut in loudly, apparently unable to stand all the awkward weirdness. “Uncle Zuko! Would you mind showing me a few moves with the dual swords this afternoon? After we’ve all had time to digest lunch, of course.”

“Just ‘Zuko’ is fine; you don’t have to call me ‘Uncle’ anymore,” he said with a small smile. “And yes, I’d be delighted to… though you’ll have to forgive an old man whose speed and agility aren’t what they used to be.”

Bumi narrowed his eyes. “I know that’s a trap. You’re trying to get me to underestimate you. I would _never_ fall for that one… _Fire Lord_ Zuko.”

Zuko’s smile was crinkling his right eye again. He had never really known how to handle Bumi’s rambunctiousness and outrageous sense of humor, but he was warming to him as Bumi matured and learned to show a more tempered playfulness, like Aang’s.

Kya was torn between wanting to avoid the adults for the rest of the afternoon and wanting to get to know Zuko better. He was so serious, so intense, so focused… but that hint of a sense of humor, that out-of-practice laugh, made her wonder if she really could be his daughter. She had a bit of a temper, too, though not nearly as legendary as the teenage Prince Zuko’s…

Kya resolved her dilemma by taking her book and sitting in the shade of the trees that ringed the practice courts, where she could see the combatants but they couldn’t see her. She read (or attempted to) for about an hour before Zuko and Bumi, wearing comfortable exercise clothes, emerged onto the one flat court that didn't have any airbending training equipment (bamboo poles or spinning gates).

Everyone else followed them and sat on the benches surrounding the courts to watch. Apparently this training session or sparring match, or whatever it was, was the hot ticket this afternoon. “Where’s Kya?” Aang asked Tenzin.

“I think she went back into the woods to read,” he said.

“Must be an interesting book…”

“I don’t think so,” Tenzin said frankly. “She’s been in a weird mood lately. I think she’s avoiding everyone.”

Kya held her breath, praying to all the spirits of air and ocean that he wouldn’t just blurt out what it was about. He’d always been a tattletale, that goody-goody little brat…

“She has been asking some odd questions,” Katara observed.

The blood was draining from Kya’s face and she felt cold and sick.

Tenzin shrugged. “I have no idea what’s going on. Girls are strange.”

Kya slowly let out the breath she’d been holding. She owed Tenzin a huge favor. Or maybe she’d get him a nice present. (What would a hopeless nerd want? Another book?)

Everyone’s attention returned to the practice court, where Zuko was demonstrating the proper starting stance with the dual dao. He always took them with him when he traveled, not because he expected to be attacked—and he could defend himself much more quickly with firebending, if it came to that—but because he liked to stay in practice… and one never knew when the opportunity for a sparring session would arise. Katara had said that Uncle Sokka, Aunt Suki, and Auntie Toph were coming to visit the island from the City tomorrow; maybe Zuko was anticipating a friendly match with Sokka or Suki, for old times’ sake.

Bumi tried to imitate Zuko’s stance, using two short wooden staves in place of the swords. Zuko corrected the placement of his hands and feet, and the distribution of his weight, with remarkable patience, only occasionally barking before he reined himself back in.

Aang noticed, too. “You weren’t nearly this patient when you were teaching me,” he remarked.

“I was sixteen,” Zuko snapped, just a little. “And I’ve taught my own daughter firebending since then,” he added, his voice level again.

“You’re teaching Izumi firebending yourself?” Tenzin asked, surprised. Of course his father was teaching him (there was no one else who could), and Kya’s mother was teaching her, but it was natural to assume that the Fire Lord had people for that.

Zuko looked like he might have wanted to snap in annoyance again, but he didn’t. “Of course I’ve had help from the Fire Sages, and I keep a tutor on hand for the days when I can’t spare a moment from my other duties to the nation. But yes, I’ve always been her primary teacher.”

“You wanted her relationship with you to be like yours with Iroh, not with your father,” Aang said gently, with sadness in his voice.

“Yes,” was all Zuko said. Then he went back to critiquing Bumi’s stance.

Aang and Katara had sat their children down and told them how Uncle Zuko had gotten his scar as soon as they’d been old enough to ask—Bumi and Kya first, when they were six and four; Tenzin two years later, setting things straight after Bumi had traumatized him with an eight-year-old’s version.

Kya had cried and cried and refused to be in Aang’s presence for days, imagining him putting a hand to her face and… Finally Katara had held her, bending cool water back and forth between her hands and her daughter’s, while Aang showed her how firebending could be used for harmless, useful things: lighting and extinguishing candles, igniting a stick of incense, heating a cup of tea. She consented to sit on his lap while he breathed deeply, stoking and banking his inner fire; she leaned against his chest and felt how it warmed and cooled with his breath.

“Fire is energy,” he’d said. “Fire is life. Life can harm other life; but it can also help. Water can heal us or drown us; earth can nourish us, protect us, or crush us; air keeps us alive, but it can also destroy ships and homes. None of the elements are good or evil in themselves; what matters is how we use them.”

Back on the practice court at Air Temple Island, Zuko had finally let Bumi hold the actual swords—but only for the opening stance. As soon as Bumi tried to move into an attack as he would with the short sword Uncle Sokka and Aunt Suki had given him for his sixteenth birthday (which Aang had _not_ been happy about, but Sokka had convinced him that his only non-bending child needed a way to protect himself and someday, perhaps, his family), Zuko finally let loose and shouted, with all of that legendary lung power, _“What the hells do you think you’re doing?!”_

Bumi froze. Zuko snatched the swords out of his hands and sheathed them in one swift, fluid motion. _“You don’t move until I tell you to move! Back to your starting stance!”_ Bumi hastily bent to pick up the wooden staves and resumed the stance that Zuko had just spent the past half hour forcing him to perfect.

Over on the sidelines, Aang was cracking up, and Katara was hiding a smile behind her hand. Tenzin’s eyes were wide with shock, but a gleeful smile was starting to spread across his face, too.

Over the next two hours, Zuko slowly walked Bumi through a few basic attacks and parries with the dual swords. He was painfully exacting about form; he was constantly yelling at Bumi not to move until his feet were placed correctly, his grip was correct, his weight was shifting correctly through the stances. After an hour, Bumi had sweated through his shirt, but Zuko looked perfectly cool and comfortable, with not a strand of his severely pulled-back hair out of place. In fact, he looked thrilled to have an opportunity to yell to his heart’s content.

Eventually, Zuko grudgingly let Bumi run through the moves he had been taught with the swords again rather than just the staves. _“But if you put one foot out of place you lose that privilege! Do you understand me, soldier?”_

“Yes, sir, Sifu Hotman, sir!”

Zuko whirled around to confront Aang. _“Did you tell him to call me that?!”_

“Of course not!” Aang protested.

“He just told Bumi that he used to call you that and that you hated it,” said Katara. “Bumi figured out the rest.”

Fuming, Zuko whirled back around. _“Let’s see if you’re worth your rations, soldier!”_ he barked at Bumi.

Bumi went through the exercises, slowly but apparently to Zuko’s satisfaction, because he didn’t have the swords snatched out of his hands again.

“You might not be a complete waste of rice,” Zuko allowed. Then he took the swords back, sheathed them, and walked back toward the dormitory without another word.

“That was terrifying,” said Bumi.

“Still want to join the United Forces?” Katara asked pointedly.

“Well, yes. I can’t imagine any drill sergeant would be scarier than that.”

“Hmph,” Aang said, but didn’t dispute the point.

“Go take a shower before dinner,” Katara ordered. “No one wants to smell you while trying to eat.”

“Yes, sir!” Bumi threw her a correct United Forces salute and marched back to the house.

At dinner, Zuko was a completely different person: calm, relaxed, smiling. In fact, he looked even more relaxed than he had at previous family meals; apparently the yelling had done him good.

“I think Bumi has the makings of a fine swordsman,” he said genially.

“Really?” said Bumi. “It didn’t feel that way earlier…”

“Oh, an instructor in swordsmanship can never let you feel like you’re doing well.”

“But I assume that isn’t your approach to teaching Izumi firebending?” Katara asked significantly.

Zuko inclined his head, taking the point. “Not entirely. I try to balance encouragement with an emphasis on the importance of proper technique.”

“That was something you and Toph both had trouble with…” Aang griped.

“Twelve and sixteen, remember?” said Zuko, this time not snapping at all. “And I, at least, have figured it out since then. How is Toph, by the way? Am I going to see her on this visit?”

“Yes! Toph, Sokka, and Suki are planning to take a ferry to the island tomorrow afternoon,” Aang informed him.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” Zuko said jauntily.

“Huh?” Aang looked at Katara, who was equally nonplussed.

Zuko opened his mouth, then shook his head and said, “It’s too complicated to explain.”

Their easy banter continued, with perhaps even more casual touching than usual. At one point Katara even reached over to sweep the long hair that hung loose below Zuko’s traditional topknot behind his shoulder, as it was in danger of falling into his soup. He gave her a look that was halfway to a glare, but just as amused as it was annoyed.

Tenzin piped up whenever the conversation touched on matters of history or philosophy, while Bumi (behaving himself exceptionally well) weighed in on military and political matters as they arose. Kya remained quiet. Her parents sometimes darted concerned looks in her direction, but they didn’t ask her any direct questions.

The children’s bedtime couldn't come soon enough, as far as Kya was concerned. The question had grown to monstrous proportions in her mind and she needed to _know_. She couldn’t remember ever having been so desperate for knowledge in her life.

Initially, she followed the same procedure as last night: wash up for bed, turn off the light as if going to sleep, climb out the window to watch the lights in the windows of the living room, her parents’ bedroom, and Zuko’s guest room in the men's dormitory.

Just like last night, the lights in the living room stayed on for a while. Then, after an hour or so, they were turned off, and shortly afterward a dim light came on in her parents’ room. She waited, breathing shallowly, for the light in the dormitory. But it never came. After fifteen minutes or so, the light in her parents’ window turned off again, and still the dormitory windows remained dark. What was going on?

She crept closer, staying crouched below window level, to try to see what was happening in her parents’ bedroom, but she couldn’t detect any movement. Nor could she hear anything, which seemed… unusual, considering what she suspected they might be up to. Were they all just… _sleeping_ together? Which would be odd enough in itself, and further circumstantial evidence that her suspicions were correct, if not on this particular occasion.

Kya climbed back into her bedroom window, took off her shoes, and tiptoed down the hallway again to her parents’ door. She still couldn’t hear anything from inside, except the same periodic rustling that she’d found so uninformative last night.

On a strange hunch, she crept the rest of the way down the hall to the living room. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find… but it probably wasn’t what she actually found.

It was easy enough to see in the moonlight coming in through the wide windows. Aang was sleeping upright at one end of the couch, his head resting on one hand in such a way that he’d probably have a very sore wrist in the morning. And Zuko was sleeping stretched out along the length of the couch, his head in Aang’s lap, Aang’s other hand resting on his head as if he’d been stroking his hair when he’d fallen asleep. Someone had covered the sleeping Fire Lord with a blanket—blue, white, and gray, woven with traditional patterns of the Southern Water Tribe—and tucked it carefully around his shoulders. Aang’s coral-colored cloak had been draped over his shoulders; its length was bunched up behind him where his back met the couch, as if the person who had put it there had wanted to shield him from the chill without waking him.

It was clear enough what had happened: the three friends had been sitting on the couches talking, Zuko had gotten tired and stretched out with his head in Aang’s lap (“Yes, of course I’m still listening, I’m just resting my eyes…”), and he had fallen asleep. Aang had stayed there to avoid disturbing him, perhaps thinking that Zuko would eventually wake up and go to bed properly, and he too had fallen asleep. Before going to bed herself, Katara had covered them up with the blanket and the cloak. Kya could almost see her mother doing it, with the same fond exasperation she showed when one of the children insisted they could stay up with the adults, they weren’t tired at all, and then promptly fell asleep in a chair and had to be carried to bed. There was… _tenderness_ in the gesture.

This wasn’t exactly the confirmation Kya had sought, and maybe Tenzin would still try to explain it as the behavior of very old, very close friends, but it was enough for Kya (Zuko’s _head_ was in Aang’s _lap_ , and Aang had been _stroking his hair_ , and Katara had been _watching_ and then _tucked them in_ before she went to bed).

Kya was trembling as she walked back to her room, no longer bothering to be stealthy. She felt dizzy, lightheaded, slightly nauseous. She changed into her nightgown and got into bed, but sleep seemed impossible. She lay awake for what felt like hours, the same questions circling pointlessly through her mind. What did any of this mean? Were both of her parents involved with Zuko, or just Aang, but with Katara’s blessing? _Why hadn’t they told their children,_ at least once they were old enough to understand?

She tossed anxiously all night, catching only snatches of shallow sleep. The only way she knew she was getting any sleep at all was that the moon, instead of crawling gradually across the sky, sometimes seemed to jump over a few inches; and as morning approached, the sky would sometimes lighten by several degrees all at once rather than passing slowly through every shade of gray between midnight-blue and pale lilac.

Kya was almost never awake to see the sunrise (unless she stayed up all night with her friends in Republic City, consuming substances that would give her father a panic attack). Right now she was hardly in a mood to appreciate its fiery beauty. The only significance it had for her was the knowledge that Zuko, like all trained firebenders, would instinctively wake with the sunrise, and he and Aang would go out to meditate and train for a couple of hours, as they always did when one was visiting the other. An hour or so after dawn, Katara would wake up, drink her first cup of coffee, and start making breakfast so that it would be ready by the time the firebenders came back in and her children started wandering out from their bedrooms.

Enough after sunrise that Kya was certain Aang and Zuko would be awake and out of the house, she got up, got dressed, and went out to the dining table to wait for her mother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently the music hall and Gilbert & Sullivan operetta traditions, as well as French expressions, come from the Fire Nation. If I want to make a weird cultural reference... it's a Fire Nation thing. (What can I say, I'm a 19th-century gal, and technologically the Fire Nation was in the 19th century.)


	3. Day 3: Elucidation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armed with new evidence, Kya asks her mother what's going on between her parents and Uncle/Fire Lord Zuko. Toph, Sokka, and Suki join for a visit amid the aftermath; two of them find the whole thing extremely entertaining.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3, which was not supposed to exist, ended up being as long as Chapters 1 and 2 put together. Because they WOULDN'T. STOP. TALKING.

Kya had been waiting for perhaps half an hour when Katara ambled bleary-eyed into the kitchen, wearing a fluffy blue robe over her nightgown. She squinted into the morning light coming in through the window and blinked a few times either while her eyes adjusted, or while she registered that she wasn’t alone in the room.

“Kya? What are you doing up?” she croaked, then cleared her throat.

While tossing in bed all night, Kya had been rehearsing various ways of phrasing the question. _“You know, Mom, I’ve noticed that you and Dad can get very cuddly with Uncle Zuko, and I was wondering if there was more to that relationship than you’d been telling us.”_ Or, more directly: _“I just happened to wander out into the living room last night, and I saw Uncle Zuko sleeping with his head in Dad’s lap. Might you be able to explain what that was about?”_

But now that the moment had come to ask, all her careful formulations fled her mind. Like a horrified spectator in her own body, she found herself blurting out: “Is Uncle Zuko my dad?” And then, to her even greater embarrassment and horror, she burst into tears.

Katara looked stunned. “Oh Kya, honey, no,” she said. She sat down next to her weeping daughter and took her into her arms. “Spirits, what made you think that?”

Still choked with sobs, Kya couldn’t speak for a number of seconds. She took a few gasping breaths and was finally able to get out, “I thought maybe something was going on with him and you and Dad— you’re always _touching_ each other, and running off to the Fire Nation without us— and then last night I went out to the living room and I saw—” and the thought of describing what she had seen sent Kya into another spasm of sobs that once again prevented her from speaking.

Katara held her, shushing and rocking her, while she spent her tears. Once she had quieted, Katara said, “I’m going to explain everything, I promise, but I need coffee first. Do you want some?”

“Coffee?” Kya repeated in dull surprise. Katara had never let her have coffee even when she asked, much less offered it.

“Yes, coffee. Unless you’d rather have something soothing—I can make you a pot of tea.”

“No, coffee sounds good.” Kya thought she would probably need it, since she couldn’t have gotten more than two hours of sleep altogether.

Katara got a napkin out of the cupboard for Kya to use as a handkerchief, then disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Kya alone again. She was still sniffling and wiping her eyes (and the napkin came away very messy after she blew her nose), but the first time in the past day and a half, she was starting to feel calm. She didn’t know what she was going to find out, but she would finally have answers, finally have certainty.

Katara came back out with two huge cups (bowls, really) of steaming coffee. Kya noted that the liquid in her cup was considerably paler than in her mother’s. Katara noticed the way her gaze moved between them and said, “Yours is half milk. You’re not used to it, and I don’t need you bouncing off the walls until midnight.”

That wasn’t entirely accurate: Kya had had coffee while out in the city with her friends (and with Toph, whose attitude was that what Aang and Katara didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them). She didn’t really like the taste, but it made her feel grown-up and sophisticated. This heavily diluted version was much better, though: she could taste not only the bitterness, but the warm, smoky flavor promised by the aroma. The smell always reminded her of long, slow mornings with her mother: two waterbenders commiserating over their difficulty adjusting to daylight, especially compared to the perky morning airbenders in the household.

“All right,” said Katara after taking several long sips of her coffee. “Let’s start over from the beginning, slowly. What is it that you want to know?”

Kya took a deep breath, bracing herself. “What’s going on with you, Dad, and Uncle Zuko?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly despite her heroic efforts to keep it level.

Katara sighed. “Yes, all three of us are lovers.”

And there it was, stated so simply and calmly, as if it didn’t change the shape of Kya’s entire universe.

“Why did you never tell us?”

“We couldn’t risk it getting out. Mostly for Zuko’s sake: it was bad enough for some in the Fire Nation that he was good friends with the Avatar and his band of Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom friends who defeated Ozai; if they found out he was also sleeping with two of them… And not only that: his marriage to Mai was an overture of reconciliation with conservative elements in the nobility. For him to take other lovers… they would regard it as an unforgivable insult.”

She paused to clear her throat—her voice was still rusty this early—and drink some more of her coffee. “But it wasn’t just Zuko. Aang also worried about losing the support of conservative parties in the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribes if it was known that the Avatar had a lover of the same sex—and the ruler of the hated Fire Nation, no less.”

“Does Aunt Mai know?” Kya had never been particularly fond of Mai, but she knew Tenzin was: he considered it a great honor that the notoriously cold Fire Lady showed him some measure of warmth.

“Yes, she knows. She and Zuko have an agreement: he gets his relationship with me and Aang, and she maintains a similar relationship with her old school friend Ty Lee.”

Kya had met Ty Lee, and she was as different from Mai as it was possible to be: cheerful, expressive, and dynamic where Mai was solemn, stoic, and self-contained. They balanced each other, albeit from opposite extremes.

“And you didn’t trust us to keep it secret,” Kya said, letting Katara see a touch of hurt.

Katara smiled wryly. “Well, no. Aside from the fact that you are all children—even Bumi, legally, at least for the next two months—you are also your father’s children. And he was _terrible_ at keeping secrets when he was your age.” She chuckled quietly, her eyes distant in memory. “In fact, he was barely a year older than you are now when he first kissed Zuko, and then confessed to me about it two days later. Yes, we’ve been lovers for that long,” Katara added, seeing Kya’s jaw drop.

“And… you know that we are all Dad’s—that is, Avatar Aang’s children?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure?” Kya pressed, her voice unsteady again.

Katara put a warm, steady hand on her daughter’s trembling one and looked firmly into her eyes. “Zuko and I have always been very, very careful. We’ve always known we couldn’t afford to make a mistake.”

“Because if you had a child who was a firebender, everyone would know.”

“A firebending child, or even a child with golden eyes—there would be no question who the father was, considering how close our group of friends has always been. ‘Team Avatar,’ as Sokka likes to call it. And not only would the knowledge of our affair destabilize Zuko’s position; an illegitimate child could be used as a weapon against him and his legitimate heir, as a pawn in a power struggle among the nobility.”

Katara paused for another sip of her coffee. “But again, that wasn’t the only consideration. Aang and I agreed that we weren’t prepared to raise more than three children; in fact, we would have preferred to stop at two. But it was so, so important to him—important to both of us, and to the whole world—that at least one of them be an airbender. I couldn’t risk the possibility of bearing a child that wasn’t his, that had no chance of preserving the airbenders’ legacy.”

“So… you wouldn’t have had Tenzin if Bumi or I had been an airbender?” Kya had always wondered whether her parents—especially her father—were disappointed in her and Bumi for not being airbenders. This seemed like the strongest proof yet: they’d wanted to have only two children, but they had to have a third because she and Bumi weren’t what they needed their children to be. Tenzin was the child they’d wanted; the others were failed attempts.

“Of course I love Tenzin very much, and I’m not at all sorry I had him!” Katara said quickly. That wasn’t exactly the reassurance Kya needed… and Katara must have perceived the hesitation and confusion in her face, because she added, “I wouldn’t want any of you to be any different than you are.” She paused. “Well, I do wish Tenzin would lighten up once in a while… and Bumi could stand to tone it down. Maybe they could meet somewhere in the middle…?”

That drew a genuine laugh from Kya, surprised and grateful. Then she sobered again and asked, “Are you going to tell Bumi and Tenzin? About you and Dad and Zuko, I mean.”

Katara sighed. “It looks like I have to. It’s not fair to tell one of you but not the others.” She frowned, thinking. “Did you say anything to them about your suspicions?”

“Yeah,” Kya said shamefacedly. “Just after Uncle Zuko arrived, and you sent us all out of the house.”

Katara blinked. “Is that what raised your suspicions? The fact that I made you leave so we could catch up, just the three of us?”

“Well… partly.”

Katara shook her head, laughing. “We really were just talking. Boring grown-up political stuff, mostly.”

“Oh.” One point for Tenzin; about a thousand for Kya.

Katara yawned and glanced out the window at the position of the sun. “I should get started on making breakfast; Aang and Zuko will be back in soon, and it probably won’t be long before Tenzin is up. Bumi is always a wild card…”

“In more ways than one,” Kya remarked, and Katara laughed ruefully.

Without prompting, Kya followed her mother into the kitchen to help. Katara put her to work slicing fruit and stirring porridge so it wouldn’t stick to the bottom of the pot.

Kya heard the door open and Aang called, “Good morning, my waterlily, my sweet jasmine flower…” Katara snorted and rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

Aang came into the kitchen with six eggs, collected from the coop out by the vegetable gardens where the chicken-geese were kept. He was holding them carefully in the fabric of his tunic, which he held out toward Katara.

“Kya!” he said, eyebrows raised, when he spotted her. “You are not the child I would have expected to see up at this hour…”

Kya wasn’t sure how to respond, so she just kept stirring, and felt her face flushing.

Katara stepped in to rescue her. “We’re going to have to have a conversation with our children, dear,” she said, collecting the eggs from Aang two at a time to rinse them and put them in a pot to boil. “You too, Zuko,” she said, glancing up at him.

The Fire Lord was already getting teapots, teacups, and two kinds of tea leaves out of a cabinet. _Of course he knows where everything is in our kitchen…_ “Me?” he asked, startled. “Why?”

“Kya came across the two of you in the living room last night.”

“Oh f— oof,” said Zuko. _Nice save,_ Kya thought. She might have rolled her eyes at the wall.

“That’ll teach you to fall asleep on the couch instead of just _going to bed_ when you’re that tired,” Katara said with only half-teasing irritability. “Honestly, you’re like children…”

Aang drew in a sharp breath. “Kya, honey,” he said, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. She paused her stirring and looked up; her face still felt very hot. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his brow furrowed.

“For what?” she asked. Which didn’t mean she thought he had nothing to be sorry about; she just wanted to know what _he_ thought he needed to apologize for.

“That you had to find out that way. That we didn’t tell you before you found out that way.”

 _Good answer,_ she thought, but didn’t say. She just nodded wordlessly and went back to stirring.

“Good morning, everyone,” came Tenzin’s cheerful voice from the dining room. He wandered into the kitchen and looked around, and his smile faded. “Why is everyone looking so serious? And Kya, why are you—” He broke off. His eyes narrowed, then widened; Kya could almost see the gears turning in his mind.

“Why don’t you go see if your brother is awake? Breakfast is almost ready,” said Katara.

Tenzin looked warily around at the solemn faces in the kitchen, nodded, and walked back out.

Kya helped her parents and… whatever Zuko was (calling him ‘Uncle’ now seemed highly inappropriate) carry the food and dishes out to the table. Then they sat in heavy silence, waiting for her brothers. She kept her gaze directed down at the table and fiddled with her spoon, because she didn’t think she was ready to look at Zuko yet.

Tenzin returned with a yawning, bleary-eyed, clearly hastily dressed Bumi in tow. “What’s going on?” Bumi asked, his voice gravelly. “Tenzin made it sound like someone had died…” He took in the grim-looking company at the table. “…and now I think I believe him.”

“No one died,” Katara said with muted amusement. “But your father and I do have something to tell you. Help yourselves to breakfast first, though.”

Food was passed around and dished out in complete, eerie silence. Kya felt an inexplicable urge to start laughing inappropriately.

“So… what did you want to tell us?” Tenzin asked apprehensively once everyone had served themselves and a few of them had started taking cautious bites (or just poking listlessly at their porridge, in Kya’s case).

Katara cleared her throat and looked significantly at Aang, who hastily put down his spoon. Zuko was clutching his cup of tea with both hands, looking down at it intently, probably wishing it wasn’t tea.

“You know that your father and I have been very good friends with your… with Zuko for a long time.” Kya could tell that she had been about to say _“your Uncle Zuko”_ and then realized how incongruous that was about to become. _How did they manage to call him ‘Uncle Zuko’ around us with a straight face for all those years?_ Kya wondered.

“What we haven’t told you, but Kya figured out, is that we aren’t _just_ friends with Zuko.” She put a hand on Zuko’s, still clutching his teacup and nervously spinning it in place.

Tenzin’s mouth fell open, and his eyes shot over to Kya. Bumi hastily swallowed a mouthful of porridge before he choked on it.

“ _Both_ of you?” Bumi wheezed. “I mean… all three of you?”

“Yes,” said Aang, putting a hand on Zuko’s other hand.

Zuko abruptly stood up. “I know it’s early, but I think this conversation requires something other than tea. Or coffee,” he added, looking over at Katara’s enormous cup (her second of the morning). “Anyone else?”

Aang and Katara exchanged one of their complex, only partially interpretable looks. Kya thought she detected worry coming from Aang’s side and warning from Katara’s, but she knew there were layers of shared experience and mutual understanding that were inaccessible to her.

“Sure, why not?” said Katara. Zuko went to a side table to fetch the bottle of plum brandy he had brought for after-dinner drinks and a couple of fresh cups. “Just pour it in the coffee,” Katara said, holding out her cup. Zuko made a face suggesting that he didn’t approve of this use of good brandy, but he complied.

Bumi drained his teacup and also held it out. “Hit me,” he said.

“Kya?” Zuko asked, proffering the bottle. Katara raised her eyebrows and Aang frowned, but neither objected.

 _Is he trying to buy me off?_ “Sure,” Kya said cautiously. He poured a small amount into one of the new cups and pushed it across the table to her.

“Sorry, Tenzin,” said Zuko with a wry quirk of his lips. “No one should start drinking as young as Azula and I did.”

“Airbenders aren’t supposed to drink anyway,” Tenzin said, looking at Aang, who gave him an encouraging little smile.

“Air Nomad _monks_ aren’t supposed to drink,” Bumi corrected. “I reckon air _benders_ can do what they want.”

Kya took a sip of her brandy and gave an exaggerated grimace, as if she hadn’t expected the burn. She didn’t need her parents to know what she got up to with her school friends.

“All right,” said Katara, calling the meeting once more to order. “I’m sure you have questions.”

Kya was only half listening as Katara, Aang, and Zuko took turns explaining the political reasons for their secrecy. Bumi asked the question about paternity—apparently Kya’s doubts had gotten into his head.

As Kya had expected, Tenzin was wounded on Mai’s behalf. “Does that mean you and Aunt Mai don’t really love each other?” he asked Zuko, somewhere between plaintive and accusing.

Zuko hesitated before answering, and glanced between Aang and Katara. “We do love each other… maybe not the way you’d expect a husband and wife should—the way your parents do—but in our own way. We’re very good friends and close partners. We work very well together, in navigating court politics, coordinating administrative work, managing Izumi’s education. We understand each other… perhaps better than anyone.” He didn’t add _except Aang and Katara_ , which Kya found very interesting.

Tenzin didn’t look completely convinced, but he didn’t pursue the matter further, other than to remark, “Does _everyone_ like both men and women?” (This was in response to the news about Mai and Ty Lee as well as Aang and Zuko.)

Katara laughed, and Tenzin looked a bit hurt. Aang said gently, “I often suspect that most people do, to some extent… though some lean very far in one direction or the other.” He glanced at Katara and quirked a half-smile as he said this. Kya looked down at her food, not wanting to attract his gaze. She didn’t find boys interesting at all… though maybe that was because her brothers were such unimpressive exemplars of the type.

“And some people don’t like either men or women… sexually, or romantically, or both,” Aang added. Now he was looking at Bumi, who to Kya’s knowledge had never had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or even a crush.

“And some people don’t like people at all,” Katara said, lightly punching Zuko in the shoulder.

“Who, me?” Zuko asked, sounding mildly affronted. “I think you have me confused with Toph. Or my wife.”

“How do you suppose you understand each other so well?” Katara asked wryly.

“…a healthy skepticism about motives?”

Katara shook her head and gave an amused-frustrated snort. “Aang trusts everyone until they prove to him that he shouldn’t, and you _mis_ trust everyone until they prove you shouldn’t. It’s a wonder either of you can function at all.”

“But that’s why we make such a great team!” Aang said brightly, giving Zuko’s shoulder a fond squeeze. “And we have you and Sokka to cover the rest of the spectrum.”

“It certainly helps to have Toph as a human lie detector,” Zuko added dryly. “Mai has joked that we need to kidnap her for court functions…”

“Mai jokes?” Bumi asked with genuine surprise.

“Of course she does! She’s not an automaton,” said a disgruntled Zuko. Bumi wisely didn’t reply.

As the tension in the room eased, Kya suddenly felt her sleepless night catching up with her. She covered a yawn and propped herself up with her forearms on the table, her head starting to droop.

Katara noticed. “Kya, honey, why don’t you go back to bed for a few hours? You look exhausted.”

Tenzin gave her a suspicious look that seemed to say, _“Up all night snooping, were we?”_ Fortunately, though, he chose once more not to tell on her. Maybe he was starting to turn into an actual human being.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Kya said gratefully to her mother, and stood up to go.

Zuko stood up, too. He looked awkward, uncertain, apologetic. He put a hand briefly on her forearm, then quickly withdrew it, clearly unsure whether it was the right gesture. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said. He met her eyes at first, then looked to the side. For a moment it made Kya feel incredibly powerful—the sole ruler of the Fire Nation, the great redeemer who turned his country away from war and conquest, apologizing to her, too embarrassed to meet her eyes!—and then she felt ashamed of her own feeling of triumph.

“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s all right. I understand.” It wasn’t entirely true yet, but she said it as a promise that it would be soon.

“Thank you,” he said earnestly, meeting her eyes again.

Kya definitely wasn’t interested in boys—or men—but for a moment she thought she knew what her parents saw in Zuko. Breaking through the layered shells of courtly propriety, prickly aloofness, and volatile temper to the vulnerability underneath was like cutting through the tough rind of a pomegranate or a perfectly ripe pineapple—all the sweeter and more rewarding for the effort it took. _Those cheekbones don’t hurt, either. I wonder how Izumi’s tastes run…?_

And that thoroughly ridiculous thought was an undeniable sign that Kya desperately needed to get some sleep. She dragged herself back to her room and barely managed to get out of her clothes before she collapsed into bed.

It was late afternoon when Kya awoke, groggy and disoriented. She could hear voices from outside her open window, in particular two very distinctive and (truth be told) somewhat strident voices: Uncle Sokka and Auntie Toph (who was _not_ to be called ‘Auntie’ in her presence).

Kya cleaned herself up and got dressed again, preparing to face company, and wondering all the while: did they know? They must; they were her parents’ closest friends (or relative, in Sokka’s case). They couldn’t have kept it secret from them for all these years. Nor would they have wanted to: it would be terribly painful to hide such an important part of their lives from the people closest to them. Still… they _had_ hidden it from their children their whole lives. Kya decided that she wouldn’t risk mentioning it if Sokka or Toph didn’t bring it up first.

When Kya went outside, she found everyone ringing the flat practice court again, only this time with a more festive atmosphere: instead of sitting silently on the benches, they had brought out more comfortable cushioned chairs and were sipping iced mango juice. Zuko was on the court again with his dual swords, sparring with Suki, who was wielding two bladed fans. Both of them had worked up a sweat; they were breathing hard, their foreheads damp and strands of hair sticking to their faces and necks.

It was… something to watch. Kya would never, _ever_ admit it to anyone in her family, but watching Suki practice with the other Kyoshi Warriors had played a major role in bringing Kya to the realization that she was attracted to women rather than men.

Their audience around the court, however, was only half watching (in Toph’s case, with her bare feet resting on the edge of the court) while chatting with each other, sometimes commenting on the match—Sokka exclaiming with pride and admiration when Suki made especially impressive displays of skill, groaning when Zuko gained an advantage—and sometimes discussing completely unrelated topics: Republic City politics, the weather, the discomforts of aging…

Kya hovered behind the other spectators for a few minutes, until Toph abruptly said, “I know you’re there, Kya, you can stop lurking any time now.”

Everyone else turned to look at her, which was exactly what she’d been trying to avoid.

“Kya!” Sokka said brightly. He stood up to give her a one-armed hug (he was still holding his glass of mango juice in the other hand). It hadn’t exactly been ages since they’d seen each other—Sokka and Suki lived in Republic City, so they saw their niece and nephews at least once a week—but Sokka liked giving hugs, and Kya felt like she could use one.

“So, Kya—I’m told that you, like me, have inherited your Grandpa Hakoda’s powers of deduction… even though it skipped your mother,” Sokka said with a smug wink at Katara, who narrowed her eyes and curled her lip in a _screw you_ expression that Kya recognized as one she herself often directed at Bumi.

Well, it didn’t take long for that topic to come up… and that answered Kya’s question about Sokka and Toph’s state of knowledge.

“I guess,” said Kya.

“Come, sit next to me,” said Sokka. He sat back down and patted the bench next to his chair. Kya sat. “Walk me through your reasoning process.”

Kya looked nervously at Bumi and Tenzin, who had stopped watching the sparring match and were now looking attentively at her. Bumi’s expression was amused; Tenzin’s had the air of a challenge.

“Um, well… it occurred to me because Mom and Dad kicked us out of the house when Unc— when Zuko arrived. And I started thinking about how often one or both of them go to visit him without us, and even when they _do_ take us to visit, they find reasons to send us out so they can be alone. And at first I thought that was a silly thing to be suspicious about, because what did I think they would be doing? But then I thought about how they do get more _touchy_ with Zuko than with any of their other friends… so maybe it wasn’t so silly.”

“Very good. Observation, formulation of hypothesis. Now, how did you go about testing your hypothesis?”

“Testing…?” Kya glanced back over at Bumi and Tenzin, who were looking expectant and _very_ interested.

“Yes, testing. What experiments did you design? Please tell me you didn’t go straight from your hypothesis to asking your mother about it; that’s no fun. And it’s not how science works! You can’t just… go ask the world what laws it lives by.”

Aang and Katara were still watching the match, pretending not to be listening, and Toph was sipping her mango juice and looking supremely unconcerned, but Kya could tell that they were all just as eager to hear the answer as Sokka and her brothers were. She never had explained to her mother why she had been in the living room last night…

There didn’t seem to be a graceful way to avoid confessing, so Kya decided she might as well just rip off the bandage now. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for the fallout.

“After they sent us to bed, I watched the lights in the windows of the living room, Mom and Dad’s bedroom, and Zuko’s guest room to see where people were going and when. But I wasn’t close enough to see anything through the windows!” she added quickly in response to Tenzin’s horrified gasp. Toph cackled and Aang swiped a hand slowly over his face.

“I didn’t learn anything the first night.” Which was perfectly true; Kya didn’t need to disclose the bit about listening for snoring at her parents’ door so she could check to see how many people were in the bed. “But the second night the lights didn’t come on in the guest room. So… I listened outside the door to Mom and Dad’s room to see if I could tell what was going on.”

She chanced a look at her parents. Aang’s hand was still over his face; Katara’s lips were pressed very tightly together, a muscle in her jaw twitching.

“I couldn’t hear anything,” Kya continued. “So I went out to the living room… I’m not sure why. And then I saw…” She trailed off; her mouth felt very dry, so she licked her lips and swallowed nervously. “Well, Mom probably told you.”

“Yes, yes she did.”

It was only a matter of time before Katara couldn’t hold it in anymore: she looked like she was going to crack a tooth if she kept clenching her jaw. “You were _spying_ on us?” she burst out. “Kya, I hope I don’t have to tell you how— how _intrusive_ that is, what an appalling betrayal of trust… You should have just _asked_ me to begin with!”

Aang now had his face in both hands. Tenzin was looking sanctimonious and vindicated—an entirely too familiar expression on him. Sokka and Bumi looked uncomfortable but entertained in spite of themselves; Toph just looked entertained.

Being reprimanded by her mother was guaranteed to provoke Kya’s defensive temper under any circumstances, but all the more so when she was torn between the conviction that she was in the right and the niggling doubt that she was in the wrong. “I couldn’t just _ask_ you when all I had was a vague suspicion! What if I’d been wrong? You would have been offended that I even asked! And if I was right—which I _was_ —you’d been hiding it from me for _fifteen years_. Excuse me for thinking that maybe _you didn’t want me to know!”_

At some point Suki and Zuko had finished sparring and were now staring at their audience in apprehension and alarm.

“Um… do I want to know?” Zuko asked, his eyes shifting between Kya and Katara.

Katara turned toward him, eyes flashing, and opened her mouth to start shouting again, but Aang preempted her. “No, you really don’t,” he said quickly. Katara glared murder at him, but shut her mouth again.

Zuko nodded, looking relieved. “I’m going to go take a shower before dinner,” he said.

“Me too,” Suki said hurriedly, and they headed back toward the dormitories, Suki casting one bemused glance back at Sokka, who shrugged helplessly.

“Kya, you are grounded through the end of the school year,” Katara said through gritted teeth. “No more going out with friends in the city. No school friends coming here. You come back here _immediately_ after school every day. Is that understood?”

Kya drew in a breath and opened her mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. Arguing could only make things worse for her… and on reflection, she probably deserved it. “Yes, I understand,” she said, defeated and a little sullen.

“Good. I’m going to go get started on dinner,” Katara announced. She huffed as she turned away, and her breath steamed a little—probably inadvertently, which was mildly alarming.

“Well, that was fun!” Toph said cheerfully. “Two sparring matches for the price of one.”

“Toph, could you please…” Aang began, then stopped, looking defeated.

“Could I what, Twinkletoes? Take this seriously? Not on your life. Your bed—literally!—you made it, you lie in it.”

Aang sighed. “I’m going to go help Katara with dinner.” He looked at Kya as if he was considering saying something, but he just put a hand lightly on her shoulder as he left.

Kya turned back toward Sokka with a faintly accusing look. Sokka also put a hand on her shoulder, firmer and more comforting than Aang’s ambiguous gesture. “Those who fearlessly pursue knowledge will too often be met with persecution,” he said. “We must persevere regardless.”

“When did _you_ find out?” Kya wanted to know.

“Grab a chair, would you?” Sokka called to Tenzin and Bumi, who were still sitting on the bench looking a little shell-shocked. Kya assumed that applied to her, too, so she picked up Toph’s chair when the latter stood up.

“We’ve known from the very beginning. Hell, we found out before Zuko did,” Toph said.

“Uh…”

“What she means is that we overheard Aang and Katara discussing the arrangement before they brought the proposal to Zuko,” Sokka filled in.

“I see. And how have you all managed to keep it secret for… what, almost thirty years?”

Tenzin and Bumi were following very closely and being remarkably quiet: clearly they were just as interested in the answer.

“Letting all and only the right people in on it,” said Toph. “Highly specialized elite guards are the only people who needed to know.”

“That means all the members of the White Lotus and the Kyoshi Warriors. If the Avatar, the Fire Lord, and their wives wouldn’t trust anyone else to guard them, who would question it? After all they’d been through, they needed the very best—people whose skill and loyalty were beyond doubt. Not to mention their discretion.”

“It helps having me as Chief of Republic City Police,” Toph added. “I make all the hotel arrangements for distinguished visitors like the Fire Lord who have special security requirements. And oh, why not book a room for the Avatar, too; if the function goes late we won’t be able to arrange an escort back to Air Temple Island… it’ll be safer if he just spends the night in the city. And whaddya know, their rooms are right next to each other…”

“You were… arranging assignations between Dad and Unc— and Fire Lord Zuko?” Kya kept slipping back into old habits.

“Not arranging, exactly; just… facilitating,” Toph said airily.

Bumi was hung up on something else Sokka had said. “ _All_ the members of the White Lotus? So… Prince Iroh knew? And King Bumi? And Master Piandao? And—”

By this time they had made it back into the house and were returning the chairs to their places in the dining room.

“Why are we still talking about this?” came Aang’s plaintive voice from the kitchen.

“It’s kind of a big deal,” Toph called back. “You just dropped a giant boulder on your kids. It’s going to take them a while to dig their way out.”

Kya was astonished: that was probably the most compassionate thing she’d ever heard Toph say.

Sokka continued answering Bumi’s question as if that exchange hadn’t happened. “Yep, all of the White Lotus. Iroh was very sympathetic and understanding…”

“Heh, he _understood_ that his nephew the Grump Lord needed to get laid,” Toph interjected. That remark seemed far more in-character.

“Toph!” That was Katara’s disembodied voice scolding them now. Toph and Sokka ignored her.

“King Bumi was… less sympathetic,” Sokka went on.

“Why?” Tenzin asked. “Did he still resent the Fire Nation for taking Omashu?”

“Nah, that had nothing to do with it. No, he just gave your father _so much_ crap. He _never_ missed an opportunity to make a joke about threesomes or ‘swinging both ways.’”

“Neither did you, Sokka, you hypocrite,” said Aang’s voice, with uncharacteristic bite.

“You have no idea how many opportunities I missed—nay, deliberately let pass!” Sokka protested with an air of martyred virtue. “Not Bumi. That man was a bad joke-making _machine_. A master pun-bender.”

“He was a true national treasure,” Toph said with reverence. “The second greatest earthbender of all time, and my personal hero.”

“I have very big shoes to fill,” Bumi said solemnly. “Or big… lack of shoes.”

They observed a moment of silence to contemplate King Bumi’s shoeless pun-bending legacy.

“I’m going to go see if Mom needs any help in the kitchen,” said Tenzin, who was looking bemused at that whole line of conversation.

“Good idea,” said Sokka. He leaned into the doorway and said, “Sister dearest, is there anything I can do to assist you?”

“Oh, I think you’ve done enough for one day,” Katara said acidly. Sokka backed away with his hands up in surrender.

Suki returned from the shower, her short hair still damp. She headed straight for the kitchen, pausing only to kiss the top of Sokka’s head as she passed by the dining table, and also asked Katara if she needed any help. Katara graciously accepted her offer, perhaps a little louder than necessary.

Zuko came in about ten minutes later; his hair was completely dry—one of the perks of being a firebender—and styled in the usual way, with half up in its topknot and the rest falling in an unfairly silky cascade down his upper back. Whoever said that women are vainer than men was a dirty rotten liar.

“Well, if it isn’t the man of the hour!” Toph said, raising her nearly empty glass of mango juice as if toasting him. “Breaker of hearts, confuser of families, complexifier of security arrangements…”

Zuko’s face flushed. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, then turned around and headed back out.

“What, is he going to go have a good scream in the woods?” said Toph. Sokka snorted, Bumi let out a short bark of laughter, and Kya failed to suppress a snicker.

Zuko returned a couple minutes later with two bottles of fine rice wine from the Fire Nation. “I brought it in case you all were coming for dinner. Little did I know how necessary it would be…”

“You can’t solve all your problems with booze, Your Fieriness,” Toph admonished him. “But you can bribe your friends to shut up.”

“There—problem solved!” said Zuko, pouring wine into three cups.

“Would one of my children set the table, please?” Katara called from the kitchen, still sounding irritable. Kya stood up to obey just as Tenzin came in with the first part of dinner: a traditional Southern Water Tribe seaweed soup, which Katara had adapted to use a warmer-water variety that grew here in Yue Bay. Aang followed him with a spiced tofu stew, Suki brought out a big pot of rice, and Katara emerged last with a bowl of noodles fried with eggs and chopped vegetables.

Zuko offered wine to Katara and Suki, who both accepted. Bumi sent a longing look in his direction; Katara sighed and gave a small nod, and Zuko poured smaller measures for Bumi and Kya. Kya hadn’t known it was possible to drink tea self-righteously, but she should have guessed that Tenzin would manage it.

“So, Zuko,” Suki began brightly. Zuko tensed, bracing himself, but all Suki asked was “How has Izumi been doing?”

Zuko’s shoulders visibly relaxed as he talked about his daughter’s progress with firebending, her aptitude for law and history, the official meetings that he and Mai had started letting her sit in on. He proudly reported that she had as much trouble keeping silent as he had at her age, but that her contributions usually came in the form of incisive questions rather than disrespectful outbursts.

Kya flinched at this casual reference to that incident; she spotted her father cringing slightly, too, and they exchanged a sympathetic glance. Zuko seemed completely unbothered, however, and continued quietly boasting of Izumi’s cleverness. Tenzin latched onto something he was saying about her interest in astronomy; Sokka joined in to lament the loss of Wan Shi Tong’s library and its magnificent planetarium.

Astonishingly, the rest of the meal passed with no reference to the elephant-mandrill in the room. Even Toph resisted the urge to needle her friends. She just complained about what a handful her younger daughter Suyin was already, compared notes on teaching difficult bending maneuvers, enthused at length about some new metalbending techniques she had developed with the Republic City Police Force.

After dinner they retired to the living room again for drinks and dessert. Sokka and Suki must have visited Kyoshi Island recently, because they’d brought back a bottle of what was apparently a very nice whiskey—Zuko and Katara _ooh-_ ed when they saw it, and Toph joined them when Zuko told her the name—and a fine powdered green tea for Aang. Preparing it involved a routine with a whisk instead of the usual steeping procedure, but they still asked Zuko to heat the water to exactly the right temperature: Aang had never achieved that level of precision with his firebending, and Katara could only bring water to boiling, not regulate its heat on the way up to that point. Toph apologized insincerely for not having anything so exotic to share and produced a few boxes of fancy chocolates from Republic City. Kya certainly wasn’t complaining about that.

The whiskey was less sweet than Kya was used to and had an odd smoky flavor on top of that, and the tea just tasted weird (though Tenzin insisted that he liked it), so she went back to the plum brandy. She could tell that Bumi didn’t really like the whiskey, either, but he was determined to prove his manliness by drinking it anyway.

It was Suki, of all people, who finally broke the embargo on a certain topic of conversation. “It must be a relief,” she said to Aang and Katara, “not to have to hide something so important from your children anymore. And I know how much you hate keeping secrets”—that was directed specifically to Aang.

Aang and Katara seemed to hold an entire conversation over the course of one long look.

“It is something of a relief,” Aang acknowledged. “But it also creates new challenges. I know the kids won’t look at us the same way anymore,” he said, steadily meeting Kya’s gaze. “We’ve probably lost some of their trust… and I can’t say that’s undeserved.”

It wasn’t just a loss of trust, Kya thought; it was proof of her parents’ fallible humanity. Proof that they were flawed and complicated, and had once been young… and (unfortunately) that they had sexual desires that went beyond the necessities of reproduction.

“Were you _ever_ planning to tell us?” Kya asked. It wasn’t an accusation; just a question.

Her parents exchanged another look. “Yes,” said Katara, “but we weren’t sure when. Every so often one of us would suggest telling you the truth—usually Aang—and we’d talk it over and decide it wasn’t the right time, we’d wait until you were older.”

“Were you going to tell me before I moved out?” Bumi asked, a little disgruntled.

“Yes, because you weren’t going to move out right when you turned eighteen,” Katara said with some asperity.

“Are you going to tell Izumi?” Suki asked, turning back to Zuko.

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know.” He took a drink of whiskey, probably stalling. “I’ll have to talk to Mai. And Ty Lee.”

What he didn’t add was that it would probably be harder for Izumi than for Kya and her brothers. Their understanding of their parents’ relationship with each other hadn’t changed—not really. Izumi, though… she would be learning that her parents’ marriage was about four parts political alliance, four parts business partnership, and three parts friendship to one part troubled romance, at most.

Well, it was a royal family. Maybe they knew to expect it.

Sokka, Suki, and Toph took the ferry back home to Republic City that night rather than staying on the Island. Zuko was staying another night; he and Druk would leave for the Fire Nation first thing in the morning.

Kya stayed away from her window. She definitely didn’t want to know who ended up in whose room or what they were doing.

* * *

Day 4: Appendix

After a quick, early breakfast, the family—certain waterbenders and non-benders among them blinking blearily in the morning sunlight—assembled in the stableyard to bid their guest (guests) farewell.

“You should come visit the Capital sometime,” Zuko said to Kya specifically—not Tenzin, not the children in general. Kya interpreted it as a peace offering.

“Sure,” she said, trying to smile sincerely while squinting. “That sounds nice.”

“Izumi would love to spend more time with you,” he added. “She’s always admired you very much.”

Interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, that's quite enough of that. I'm feeling the need to write some heavy angst next. Maybe I'll have Zuko deal with his drinking problem...


End file.
